Sunday, 6 May 2012

7 Reasons To Love NetApp

For the record:
There could easily have been a post on say 'Reasons to Love HP P4000
iSCSI SANs' – with their ease of clustering, 'Reasons to Love 3PAR'
– with 3PARs excellent "stay-thin" and "Peer Motion"
technologies, ... and the list goes on – vendor agnosticism and
open-mindedness are fantastic traits to have. An important part of
being able to sell a product – either internally to your own
company, or externally to a customer – is that you are passionate
about what you are trying to sell; so this post attempts to put
down in text some ammunition for answering the question – "Why
NetApp?"

1: NetApp are a Pure
Player

NetApp's strategy is
pure play storage. Storage is what they do and that single focus
helps them to excel at what they do – make excellent
highly-featured storage.

2: Data ONTAP

The same
operating/management system – Data ONTAP – applies to the
complete range of FAS series devices, from the FAS2000
series at the small to medium enterprise end of the
market, through the FAS3000
series, and up to the enterprise level FAS6000
series. Also, Data ONTAP is much more open in terms of accessing the
underlying operating system CLI than other rivals offerings, which is
excellent for techies.

NetApp have a
fantastically large and thriving community of enthusiasts, geeks,
bloggers, YouTube film makers, storage administors and architects.

5: NetApp is a Great
Place To Work

Any company that looks
after its staff well is onto a winner – happy staff leads to good
work, good customer service, and good results; and NetApp have won
major awards for their workplace and as a company to work for:

NetApp
Ranked #6 in FORTUNE's 100 Best Companies To Work For 2012

NetApp
Ranked #3 in World's Best Multinational Workplaces 2011

6: A Company That
Listens To And Values Its Customers and Partners

This point comes from
various sources, especially NetApp TV and NetApp's highly informative
website. Of course all good companies out there are doing (or at
least trying to do) the same – hey, needed something to get me to
number 7!

7-Mode: allows
FAS arrays to be deployed as a local two-node cluster, a
geographically spanned MetroCluster, and as a remote distributed
FlexCache.

Cluster-Mode:
expands a NetApp storage cluster from 2 nodes to 24
nodes, increases the features found in 7-mode to include
endless scaling, global name spaces, and the complete separation of
data and data access from the hardware layer in the form of next
generation vFilers.

Note: It is not
possible to change from one mode to the other without a rebuild –
check out netapp.com for the limitations of a particular mode.

FAS Series
Software Packs:

*Some of the
features may not be available for all models.

Base Pack:

Operations Manager,
SnapShot, FlexVol, Thin Provisioning, RAID-DP,
FlexShare, Deduplication(note
that the deduplication does have some limitations around unused
physical memory required in the filer {~1GB} per TB of
deduplication), NearStore, SyncMirror
(both copies of the data are owned by the same
controller), System Manager, FilerView, FC protocol, iSCSI
protocol, HTTP protocol

1 comment:

NetApp has long been considered one of the most innovative products developed to provide companies around the world with the best IT solutions. It can deliver maximum data protection and performance on your server. One particularly useful program from NetApp is SnapRestore. This software is capable of using backup copies called Snapshots to recover file systems or data volumes consisting of any number of files in just a matter of seconds. This is particularly useful for storing large amounts of sensitive information in order to prevent complete data loss.